What Really Improves Mathematical Reasoning: Structured Reasoning Signals Beyond Pure Code
A recent study investigates the role of code in enhancing mathematical reasoning. The findings suggest that while code improves programming skills, it does not universally enhance reasoning abilities, particularly in complex mathematical tasks. Instead, structured reasoning signals from various domains may provide better support for mathematical reasoning.
- ▪Code significantly improves programming ability but competes with knowledge-intensive tasks like complex mathematical reasoning.
- ▪The reasoning improvements often attributed to code are better explained by structured reasoning traces from mixed domains.
- ▪Increasing the density of structured math-domain samples can enhance mathematical reasoning while maintaining programming performance.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2605.19762 (cs) [Submitted on 19 May 2026] Title:What Really Improves Mathematical Reasoning: Structured Reasoning Signals Beyond Pure Code Authors:Yuze Zhao, Junpeng Fang, Lu Yu, Zhenya Huang, Kai Zhang, Qing Cui, Qi Liu, Jun Zhou, Enhong Chen View a PDF of the paper titled What Really Improves Mathematical Reasoning: Structured Reasoning Signals Beyond Pure Code, by Yuze Zhao and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Code has become a standard component of modern foundation language model (LM) training, yet its role beyond programming remains unclear. We revisit the claim that code improves reasoning through controlled pretraining experiments on a 10T-token corpus with fine-grained domain separation.
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